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The disinformation campaign behind the allegations of Russian “disinformation”

Amid
new exposures of Wall Street criminality, the White House’s mass
imprisonment of immigrant children, and growing demands by US workers
for decent wages, the US media was preoccupied Monday with the
supposed efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin to make people
believe that life in America is not a paradise.

Throughout
the day, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Google News all
led with breathless stories about Russian efforts to “sway
American opinion and divide the country” (in the words of the
Times). The propaganda barrage was based on a set of reports
submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee by organizations with
close ties to the US state and intelligence apparatus.

Like
countless other stories about alleged Russian “disinformation,”
Monday’s media blast followed a script. Reports and testimony from
nominally independent organizations, which are, in reality,
mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, are commissioned by
Congress. They are “leaked” to the New York Times, which
publishes a front-page article promoting them as “independent,”
scientific and authoritative, without, however, presenting any
serious analysis of the actual evidence or the social and political
forces behind the studies. The reports in the Times (or the
Washington Post) are then cited by countless media outlets and
politicians as new and irrefutable “evidence” of Russian
“meddling” and “fake news.”

The new
“proof” of Russian subversion is then used to demand even more
sweeping measures to censor the internet, in the name of securing
“our democracy.” With each successive wave of stories, foreign
“disinformation” is more directly identified with opposition to
social inequality, police brutality and the capitalist system.

The
first of two reports submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee,
“The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,” was
published by an organization known as New Knowledge, which purports
to be a cybersecurity company, but whose primary public presence
consists in advocacy for internet censorship.

Ryan
Fox, the co-founder of New Knowledge and a co-author of the report,
worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) for 15 years. New
Knowledge’s website notes that “prior to his civilian roles as a
Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT
partners, he served under US Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC)
as a CNO Analyst for the US Army.” His partner, the company’s
CEO, is Jonathon Morgan, who has published for the state-connected
Brookings Institution and worked as a special advisor to the State
Department.

New
Knowledge was established with a $1.9 million grant from Moonshots
Capital. Moonshots’ founders are Kelly Perdew, who, according to
the biography on the company’s website, “served in the US Army as
a military intelligence officer,” and Craig Cummings, who “spent
17 years in the Army, most of that time as an intelligence officer
serving in support of the National Security Agency.”

The
second report, “The IRA and Political Polarization in the United
States,” published under the imprimatur of Oxford University’s
Computational Propaganda Project, in collaboration with the social
media analysis firm Graphika, was likewise authored by figures with
deep connections to the state and the military. Graphika staffer
Camille Francois, a co-author, served as chief technical officer to
the French prime minister and worked at the US Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In line
with the by now well-established playbook, Democratic Senator Mark
Warner, the leading advocate of internet censorship in the US Senate,
took to the airwaves to proclaim that these “independent” reports
were a “wake up call.” He continued: “These attacks against our
country were much more comprehensive, calculating and widespread than
previously revealed.” He added that “addressing this challenge”
was “going to require some much-needed and long-overdue guardrails
when it comes to social media.”

Democratic
Senator Ron Wyden, like Warner a member of the Intelligence
Committee, appeared on the Public Broadcasting evening news program
to chastise Facebook and demand that it be more “aggressive” in
shutting down “disinformation.”

In
regard to their content, both reports are highly dubious and clearly
politically motivated. The raw data is based on information turned
over to the Senate Intelligence Committee last year by Facebook,
YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. After initially rejecting as “crazy”
claims that “Russian meddling” helped swing the election to
Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, together with the leaders of
other major technology companies, provided a list of accounts that
they asserted—without providing any details on how this conclusion
was reached—were controlled by Russian operatives.

Even if
one were to assume that this data and the content of the reports were
accurate, whatever Russia may or may not have done pales in
comparison to the operations of US intelligence agencies all over the
world, including within the United States itself, not to mention the
billions of dollars spent by the corporate and financial elite to
manipulate US elections and determine their outcome.

The
claim, moreover, that Russian Twitter and Facebook posts are
responsible for social discontent in the United States—the most
unequal country in the world—is beyond ludicrous.

It is
highly significant that the posts cited by the reports as responsible
for manipulating public opinion and undermining American democracy
are predominantly left-wing in character.

The New
Knowledge report attempts to muddle this reality by categorizing
content opposing police brutality as neither left-wing or right-wing,
but “Black.” It states that of 62 Facebook pages allegedly tied
to Russia, “Overall, 30 targeted Black audiences and amassed
1,187,810 followers; 25 targeted the Right and amassed 1,446,588
followers, and 7 targeted the Left and amassed 689,045 followers.”

The
content of the accounts labeled by New Knowledge as targeting “Black
audiences” is made clear in a subsequent section dealing with the
video streaming service YouTube. Of 1,063 videos turned over to the
committee, the majority “related to the police and focused on
police abuses.”

Commenting
on the New Knowledge report, the New York Times declared that the
Russian government’s “tactics echo Soviet propaganda efforts from
decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the
United States.”

Here,
the Timesdemonstrates the utterly reactionary pedigree of the
campaign against “Russian meddling.” During the American civil
rights movement, Southern segregationists claimed that African
American workers were being stirred up by “communists” and
“outside agitators.” The strivings of African Americans for equal
rights were denounced as a Soviet plot.

Now,
too, the deeply-felt hatred by American workers and youth of all
races for police brutality and the epidemic of police murders is
presented as a “Russian” plot to “sow division” among “Black
audiences.”

“Left-leaning
[Russian-inspired] pages,” the report states, “criticized
mainstream, established Democratic leaders as corporatists or too
close to neo-cons, and promoted Green Party and Democratic Socialist
themes.” These left-wing pages expressed “antiwar opposition”
and “objections to US involvement in another country’s affairs.”

The
clear intent of the campaign by Warner and his co-thinkers is to
de-legitimize such views as the product of “foreign meddling,”
and to effectively criminalize them. Their concern is not with
Russia, but with the American working class.

As the
year 2018 concludes, the intensification of the global economic
crisis and heightening of war preparations are accompanied by a
renewed upsurge of the class struggle throughout the world.

The
American ruling elite has made clear its intention to respond to this
growing movement of the working class with censorship and repression.
Writing about the recent “yellow vest” protests in France, the
New York Times warned that “the power of social media to quickly
mobilize mass anger, without any mechanism for dialogue or restraint,
is a danger to which a liberal democracy cannot succumb.” The
implication of such statements is clear: the campaign to censor the
internet must be intensified.

The
orchestrated hysteria over “disinformation” is itself a gigantic
disinformation campaign, and the narrative about the sinister spread
of “fake news” is an example of real “fake news.”

The
ruling class and the corporate media are frustrated that their claims
have had little impact on popular consciousness, and very few people
really believe that Russia is responsible for social discontent in
the United States. But this only intensifies their efforts to uphold
and strengthen the grip of the “guardians” of information—that
is, themselves.

The
growth of working class opposition provides the means to counter
these efforts to censor the internet. As workers enter into struggle,
they must take up the fight to defend freedom of expression on the
internet as inseparable from the fight for social equality.

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